Sunday, July 19, 2009

CRITICAL NOTICE to all Artist and Gallery Owners!

CRITICAL NOTICE to all Artist and Gallery Owners!

There is an extremely serious permissions bug that has been confirmed by quite a few people (including myself with my own eyes).

The problem: objects nested inside other objects are getting reset to FULL PERMISSIONS when rezzed. The problem is with permissions on objects INSIDE other objects. When a customer buys, for example, a boxed item, and rezzes the items inside the box, they are RESET TO FULL PERMISSIONS when rezzed on the ground.

This does not (and this is just *my* understanding) affect things you can't rez, like scripts. I've tried it myself and can't get any scripts to reset to full perms. It appears to happen when you rez a rezzable object in world, not just by copying to your inventory.

This is not a Server 1.27 ONLY problem. Reports are that it affects 1.26 and 1.27. It is not a client problem. Problems have been reported with different client versions, and reports seem to indicate it's a server problem, not a client problem. None of this is confirmed.

The problem is easily reproduced by using the new bulk permissions feature, HOWEVER there are many reports of nested objects getting permissions reset that were created BEFORE that feature appeared. So it appears at this point NOT to be a bug limited to the bulk permissions feature. Again, not confirmed.

For more info, see https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4444

Here's what to do, and I'd recommend you do this IMMEDIATELY!

Rez all your things that you sell that contain other items (boxed products, etc.). Take all the nested items inside it out, one by one, and rez them. Check permissions of those items as they sit on the ground. Don't just copy them to inventory, that is not a good teset. If your items on the ground are NOT supposed to be full permissions, you have been bitten by the bug. CHECK EVERYTHING.

If you purchase an item from someone, rez it, and it's full perms, be a hero and NOTIFY THE CREATOR IMMEDIATELY and let them know to pull their items off the shelves asap until they can fix this. You might get a nice freebie for being a hero :)

HOW TO FIXThere is no confirmed, reliable fix. There are reports that manually resetting the permissions one by one (do NOT use bulk permissions button) will fix the problem, and it does appear to, but there is NO guarantee they will STAY that way. We don't know how they got messed up in the first place, so it may certainly happen again to your objects. The only reliable fix until we have more info is to pull your items off the market and not sell them. This is something you may consider doing to avoid having valuable items sold as full perm, if that hasn't happened to you already :( However, there have been no reports of someone manually setting permissions *recently* and seeing them reset to full permissions, so perhaps this is a good fix. We do not know for sure yet. It may very well be a bulk permissions bug, which is a new feature, after all.